No, nothing like that.Students and alumni were, instead, turning
their ire on the
new logo for the entire university system that was recently unveiled.Facebook exploded, my union took up the cause
(to be fair they also talk about fees and contracts), and someone posted a
petition at Change.org which has since garnered over 50,000 signatures.To put that in perspective, I remember
signing petitions about fees, disinvestment, and police violence which were
lucky to get 5,000 signatures.

Now don’t get me wrong.The new logo is most charitably characterised
as a monstrosity.I’ve heard it
described variously as something anyone with a modicum of design skills could
whip up in 10 minutes (without the benefit of a focus group and a budget), as
what passed for fine art or graphic design in pre-school, as a toilet bowl, and
as the ‘C’ doing something unmentionable to the ‘U’.

The administration, exhibiting its
uncanny knack for being desperately out of touch with its students, explained
that the logo change was about making the university look more modern, up with
the times as it were.In reality of
course, it just looks goofy.Researchers
at the University of California are world class, but the only thing UCOP does
of that calibre is excuse-mongering, and their PR machine launched into
overdrive as
they explained their swift climb-down.

Some took heart from the unified front
that UC students and alumni presented to the administration, but I actually
found the whole episode a little sad and disconcerting.

It’s troubling, after all, that people
are willing to put their name to a petition rejecting a logo, but can find
neither the time nor the courage to object to terrible fee hikes and the
introduction of the sorry logic of the “free market” into our university.People complained that the logo didn’t
reflect the values and character of the University of California, but they
haven’t been willing to stand up for that wonderful institution which is our
home and was once the pride of our state.

Many students and alumni, to judge by
their actions, find the mutilation of the system’s logo more offensive than
they do the demand that they pay twice the fees that they did less than a
decade ago.They find the design flaws
in a symbolic representation of the University of California more objectionable
than they do the disfiguring of the University’s mission and public
character.

Because the real tragedy has been that successive
generations of Californians have been willing to put their short-term personal prosperity
ahead of long-term communal well-being.It is that we have created a system of government that allows one
generation to wage war on another, to create a set of conditions skewed to
benefit those who are wealthy and secure at the expense of those who struggle
and face daily uncertainty.It is tragic
that our Governor has been allowed to present decades of disinvestment and austerity
regimes as a “victory” for higher education.It is reprehensible that our community lets him and our representatives
get away with pushing this myth as inexorably as the UC Regents and the state’s
business community are pushing their grubby little market ideology, which they
pass off as a philosophy compatible with UC’s commitment to the promotion of social
and economic equality and justice.

Even Berkeley’s campus seems
increasingly quiescent in the face of what we are told is the overwhelming
logic of market diktats.Students are
too caught up in the rush of the semester and the hurry to get a marketable
degree to pause and think about how their educational experience is being
reconstructed, and how access to that experience will be circumscribed for
future generations of Californians.

We can hardly expect the state to invest
in our institution if we aren’t even willing to come to its defence.Unless the UC community regains some sense of
proportion and prepares to invest some time and energy in trying to roll back
the regressive measures of the past years, we’ll be left with a very nice logo
in a shell of a gutted institution, wondering how we allowed a public right to
be turned into a private commodity.We’ll
have to explain to ourselves and those who come after why we permitted a place
dedicated to the promotion of learning and the construction of citizenship into
a mercenary marketplace serving those citizens who can afford it and catering
to the short-term desires of the state’s corporate community rather than respecting
the long-term interests of the public.

There is no explanation for such a
transformation that would do credit to the generations which inhabit California
today.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.